Open Everything Mindmap and visualization

This mindmap could certainly be more beautifully designed and presented, but I can’t refrain from already sharing, as it presents such a condensation of the 3 years of research we’ve undertaken at the P2P Foundation.

A special thanks to Ben Dagan of Creative Commons Austria, who prodded me to undertake this visualization effort, and added some extra visual elements already. Ben and the CCAlps Salon invited me to speak on Open Everything in Vienna on 11 September at 19:30 in the Museumsquarter. It’s part of the annual Paraflows festival.

Other participants will most likely improve and change it, as will some other people associated with the P2P Foundation.

Some explanation of this draft visualization:

First the red links, that’s the most unsuccessfull part of this draft: they are meant to represent the process of ‘Circulation of the Common’, the means by which the Commons socially reproduces itself, i.e. by open and free input, which is participatorily processed to result in a universally available commons, which in turn represents open and free input for further iterations.

The main body of the visualization contains 8 aspects of processes representing the cycle of reproduction and growth of openness in our societies.

I. Aspects of Openness,

i.e. the requirement of inclusionality or open access; the demand for participation, i.e. permissionless contributions; the demand for holoptism or full transparency of that process, and finally, for full shareability and ‘changeability’ of the common material. All these represent new social expectations, and are key ingredients of commons-based peer production as well.

II. Enablers of Openness

These aspects or fundamental characteristics of openness are then embedded in enablers or ‘guarantors’. First of all are the Open Definitions, the social charters that determine the boundary conditions of the open communities and which define the minimal conditions for openness to be recognized; these are further embedded in open code, open licenses, and open standards; as well as the basic conditions which are open access and open data.

III. Infrastructures of Openness

To make it all real, we need infrastructures in which these enabling elements are embedded, i.e. we need open platforms, both virtual and physical, which alllow us to produce in a open way: open collaborative technical platforms, open places where we can gather, open media and communication infrastructures we can use, open and free software, knowledge and scientific data; and the ability to live in open and free villages and urban spaces, which connect local production with global open design communities.

IV. Open Practices

All the preceeding enablers, will allow us then to engage in open practices, especially open design and open manufacturing, but also free currencies and new forms of sharing (ownership).

V. Open Domains of Practice

These practices are obviously embedded in topical domains, such as education and science, where these practices are contextualized and made real, to finally result in all kinds of …

VI. Open Products!!

The actual ‘social artefacts’ actually created by the processes from I to V, i.e. the Apache server, the Linux operating system, etc..

All of the above gives us a circular process, leading to new iterations of open characteristics.

Note that we then add a layer of examples of each practice (in bold), as well as the sources where you can find examples in our ecology of information services at the P2P Foundation.

New social movements, specifically dedicated to increasing ‘openness’ are also specifically tackling the social awareness concerningt this shift, strengthening and increasing the numbers of people who see this as a new mode of life and ethical ideal, and as their default social practice. Like the P2P Foundation itself, they consciously work on creating open distributed infrastructures in all areas of life, interconnecting initiatives in global networks of experience sharing.

VIII. Open Consciousness

All the efforts from II to VII change our subjectivities and how we relate to each other, re-inforcing new iterations of the Open Cycle.

WRITTEN BY

Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens is the founder and president of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Bauwens travels extensively giving workshops and lectures on P2P and the Commons as emergent paradigms and the opportunities they present to move towards a post-capitalist world.
In the first semester of 2014, Bauwens was research director of the floksociety.org which produced the first integrated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador, in order to create policies for a 'social knowledge economy'.
In January 2015 CommonsTransition.org was launched. Commons Transition builds on the work of the FLOK Society and features newly revised and updated, non-region specific versions of these policy documents. Commons Transition aims toward a society of the Commons that would enable a more egalitarian, just, and environmentally stable world. He is a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, who have organised major global conferences on the commons and economics.